It's not that, and Free Software was never against paying for software. Taxes serve common good (at least ostensibly), and you have some say about it in democratic countries. You have little control over or insight into what proprietary software does, and in particular SaaS is a tool for disenfranchising users. The way they're done, you not only can't inspect, modify and improve the software, you also don't own your data anymore.
Given the horrifically low rates of voter turnout, I think it's perfectly clear that many people are okay being disenfranchised if it saves time or reduces stress. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to software. Most people demonstrably want something that works, not something they're in charge of.
The SaaSS problem is particularly insidious at the macro scale, because services substituting for software like to embed collaboration functionality that really should be handled by separate tools (and the filesystem). The resulting network effects contribute to sucking out the oxygen from the software space, so the minority of users who like their freedoms suddenly find themselves forced to use the disenfranchising services.
However, there is something odd about the GNU argument here. They have been riding a (small) wave for a long time and fear irrelevance. They get cranky if you don’t call it GNU/Linux. They basically copied Unix tools and thinking from other people, then inserted themselves into the O/S and software world, and want to be champions of “freedoms”. Fine, fine, and fine.
But it’s also fine that people don’t care. Most don’t. Most people use Gmail (and previously Yahoo Mail) and don’t want to set up their own email via Emacs, etc.
WordPress and Ubuntu are non-SaaS software (well, mostly) and are polished and easy to use. But there are for-profit aspects of those tools, too, which is partially how and why they remain sustainable.
I know searching with AWK and other tools are amazing. Supposedly. But sorry if I own a Mac and don’t go to the command line and use RegEx in AWK (or whatever GNU tool some freedom fighter says we should always use to “own” our software). I just use the very proprietary Finder or Spotlight tools that Apple built for my operating system. And some Mac owners also use software like Alfred.
This is blatantly obvious when you look at the marketplace objectively: people want simple. People do not want to spend more time learning systems and tools, but less.
If GNU wants to stay relevant, and I think that is still possible, even as their tools are rewritten and replaced in the next decade or so, they could stand to focus on attracting customers, rather than browbeating people with their philosophies. Build a better mousetrap, and all that jazz.
That said, there is a similar dynamic at play that both drives down voter participation rates and pushes users towards proprietary software.
Citizens who elect not to vote and users who elect to use proprietary software are not making those decisions in a vacuum.
It is entirely possible to place some value on your right to vote while choosing not to do so because you’ve determined that the benefit from doing so both to you personally as well as in its ability to impact the broader system is not worth the time and energy.
Analogously, it is equally possible to place some value on open and free software while choosing to use proprietary systems for exactly the same reasons.
Lots of things in the world function in this way due to network effects and inertia, as others in this thread have explained.
For example, you might be aware that prices of goods and services are inflated by the costs associated with credit card transaction fees, while still deciding to pay with credit cards because you know that your individual decision to do so will have no impact on the price that you personally pay.
That's because you've made a personal choice that free software is not important to you.
Many people take public transport even though it takes them longer because they believe that, say, driving a car is bad.
Not everyone feels that way. It's not an important issue to them.
In that sense the argument revolves primarily about how much priority you assign to a particular belief (e.g. belief in free software, belief in environmentalism, etc).
Before you think I'm going on some sort of holier-than-thou rant - there's no directionality to this.
It's a fairly general thing. If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas.
Presumably you have some goal that you think is more important than these other issues. That's the thing that has your priority - you want to spend time doing that, because you care about it more.
Take, for example, F-Droid, the free software package manager for Android. In my opinion it is free software done right. Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to publish. At no point do you have to pop a shell and interact with a dozen low level bash executables or edit deeply nested configuration files (each written in their own markup language of choice) to Get Things Done.
> If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas.
My response is that believers in X who want to make a difference will put in the effort to reduce the sacrifices others have to make to join X. As another example, consider the roles the Toyota Prius and then later the Tesla Model S/3/X played in mainstreaming the idea of owning an electric car. It wasn't that long ago that hybrid-electric cars were relegated to small columns in PopSci rather than the front page of MotorTrend. In the next few years we will see a similar transformation with vegetarianism/veganism with Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger - as soon as it costs less to make meat in a lab than it does to grow and care for livestock, you bet everyone is going to leave the cows alone. Not just for morality (although the moral argument is a powerful one), but because the alternative is simply better in every way.
If you want to be the truly superior solution, and you want people to believe in your cause, you can't expect them to make sacrifices.
Ultimately I think there are two parts. You have to realise that free software advocates aren't unlimited in their power. The commercial world is far larger (likely due to feedback effects from, well, money). So there's effectively a race there that free software advocates will find it difficult to win.
Having said that, the world is literally built on this stuff. User facing software is the final, difficult, frontier, because marketing costs money, user studies cost money, AB testing costs money, and telemetry and stuff like that allow commercial entities to gain market share using practices that are incompatible with the free software ethos.
> you can't expect them to make sacrifices.
I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good (unrelated to free software; I'm talking in the general sense here) are either misguided or outright malicious.
As a strawman example: "we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice".
Because ultimately there won't always be a magical solution. I own a Tesla and I think they're great. But if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up. And that would be a sacrifice, but it would make sense to do so, because it's a personal sacrifice for a greater good.
There is not really a solution to this dilemma other than overthrowing capitalism entirely (which I believe will happen eventually with the rise of automation), but that might be too drastic of a change at this point in time.
>I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good...are either misguided or outright malicious
Hey, I can agree with you here!
>"we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice".
Agreed that we should tax them, however...this example ignores that quite a lot of people who drive pickups actually use them for their job. For example, small business owners such as plumbers or electricians benefit greatly from driving pickups that can carry their tools rather than tiny sedans or awkward SUVs.
This type of insight is also missing from other morally guided arguments such as removing all cars from cities to promote walking and biking. What do you do about snow plowing, service vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. that modern consumers expect to cater to them directly to their households?
Making an electric pick up truck is a far better solution than taxing ICE pickups (although, again, I think that would help) because it benefits everyone without also penalizing the people who truly do need a pickup or something that can perform the role of a pickup.
In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping in to make life easier for their customers. They exist for a reason and they could not survive if enough people didn't find them valuable.
> if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up
Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car? How do you visit friends or family, how do you go to restaurants or grocery stores? How do you get to work if you don't work from home?
If your answer is better public transport, then that's not really a sacrifice you are making because there is an equivalent alternative that still does what you want but without the parts you perceive as bad or wrong. Sure you gave up your Tesla, but you'd only do that if you knew there was some other way to get around. I think if your alternative was literally walking or biking everywhere, I"m not sure if you'd be so excited.
We can do both.
> Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car?
The point is that if everyone does something in lockstep, e.g. via taxation or simply an agreement, then these solutions gain pressure to arise.
So again, we can do both. If ICE cars were taxed more heavily then a ton of investment naturally flows into alternative fuels, bus services, etc because suddenly there's an enormous competitive advantage.
That paid solutions still manage to trump many FOSS programs tells me that people value their time more than their money, and FOSS developers ought to work to develop software that takes a lot less time to do things with.
I’ll prefer OSX or something nonfree if it saves time and is consistent. This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals.
I'm talking specifically about libre software. I have no qualms with paying an expert for a service - in fact that's the basis of my career.
I'm happy with SaaS services that provide a paid option which means you don't have to muck about with self hosting, backups, and all of that jazz. Just works(tm). I think that's a great business model.
The issue I take is with proprietary software which limits the user in what they can do. Services which derive most of their profit from locking in the user (e.g. come and use our fancy cloud database, there's no way to run it locally, oops we just whacked up the price by 5x, suck it up)
> This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals.
Damn, my hobby is working out well then. ;)
This is perpetually missing from SaaS evaluation as well. You have to setup AD integration, you have to learn how to administer it, you have to learn how to export your data and what to do with it in case the company disappears, you have to setup internal support and they have to be the expensive kind of support who can debug things when the SaaS provider changes things without notice, you have to have your admins setup multiple browsers because they decided not to support IE like the rest of the company, etc.
The seat charge isn't the only cost of SaaS.
If can effectively recoup time if you have money; the relationship is symmetrical.
If any of these happened to you 20 or 30 years from now, you're gonna wish you spent your time with your family or your friends rather than head-down in 32 bash terminals or something trying to administer server clusters when you could just hire some SaaS to do it for you. Unless of course you already get an ample amount of time with everyone you'd like - there's nothing wrong with tinkering for tinkering's sake, and as long as you are happy with what you are doing there's no need to change!
If you want to spend more time with your family, go and spend more time with your family.
They're more important than the server clusters, tinkering or no tinkering.
Not everyone has this privilege. If your job demands that you manage server clusters, then that is your livelihood. Which is exactly why outsourcing aspects of your job to other companies is so appealing, and why so many SaaS's gain virulent popularity as every other company switches to their services one by one. If I can reduce the amount of headaches I have to deal with at work, I can at least arrive at home a little more energized and ready to do fun things. Rewritten, if I can convince my boss (or my wallet) to pay some other company to do my job for me so I can sit around and do easier things, I will always prefer that choice.
It is the software equivalent of arguing that taxation is theft, without acknowledging the things government works toward (infrastructure, business development, education, healthcare, national security). Note: Before the replies flood in, I understand everyone has problems with their government. The point is that you are still receiving benefits from government investment, regardless of how good those benefits are.
I don't think anyone uses a SaaS platform without realizing that they are taking the role of customer. I am paying someone else to give me a platform that translates text so I don't have to put in the effort to set up one myself. What seems to be perpetually missing from the FOSS philosophy, especially among people who love tinkering with Linux (note: I am one of them), is a valuation of time.
I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up. I will gladly pay someone else who has put in the time to develop a first-class platform so that I can go home earlier or spend my time working on something else. I have the power to make more money to cover my SaaS expenses later on; nobody has the power to generate more time that they can spend doing things that make them happy.